Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Reintroducing the $ping filter option · 2015-12-23 16:59 by Sebastian Noack

Historically, there has been the $ping filter option in Adblock Plus, to limit request blocking filters to the URL given by the ping attribute on links. When such a link is clicked, the browser sends a request to that URL in the background. This technique is mostly useful for tracking. However, it has never been enabled by default in Firefox. Therefore, with Adblock Plus 2.0, $ping got deprecated and merged into $other.

But recently navigator.sendBeacon() got introduced, which is basically the JavaScript equivalent of the ping HTML attribute. And it is enabled by default. Moreover, on Chrome, <a ping> is supported by default too. And starting with Chrome 49, it’s possible to distinguish these requests from others.

Therefore, we are reintroducing the $ping filter option (issue 3452). Starting with Adblock Plus 2.7.0.4099 for Firefox and 1.9.4.1508 for Chrome/Opera, filters using the $ping option will only match requests that are either caused by <a ping> or by navigator.sendBeacon(). Note that the filter option $other won’t match these requests anymore.

To the install page

Tags: adblock plus adblock plus chrome

Comment [1]

1. priv@cy · 2015-12-29 02:00 · #

   Hi,
   To disable sendBeacon set “beacon.enabled” to false via about:config

   Hyperlink-Auditing aka <a ping> and Beacon aka navigator.sendBeacon()

Commenting is closed for this article.